Absolutely delighted that our paper on epigenetic dynamics during plant aging is out today in Science! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

For 61 years the #BBCWorldService has been broadcasting the latest in science via its weekly Science in Action programme. That dies in the next half hour, with this final edition, reflecting on the fall in trust in expertise driven by malign interests over recent years.

Snake bites kill/debilitate 1000s of people annually in Sub-Saharan African. A new nanobody cocktail is shown to be highly effective against 17 of the most dangerous African snake species. Unlike other anti-venoms it also protects against venom-induced dermal necrosis🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Transposable elements drive much of naturally occurring genetic lethality in Drosophila melanogaster https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.16.682755v1

genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... From the Gehring Lab. Ros1 prevents paternal hypermethylation of the endosperm genome.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Cool observation.

Lab’s 1st preprint! Menstruation is understudied due to societal taboos + a biological challenge: mice (a key system for research + drug discovery) don’t menstruate. @cagricevrim.bsky.social made menstruating mice + used them to discover early events in menstruation. He is on the job market!

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

Aww man, Smoot died. One of my dad's small points of pride that he handed a very special bottle of photoresist under the table as "test sample" to a pair of researchers who were never gonna order industrial quantities, but was enough to make COBE's detectors. news.berkeley.edu/2025/09/29/n...?

Just an outrageous amount of structural variation in pennycress. While not yet reproductively isolated, its likely these shredded pericentromeres contribute to some reproductive incompatibilities.

Out today in JAERE! We measure water pollution released at India's industrial clusters. Does it hurt agriculture? Surprisingly: Not by much Come for how we published a paper of null results & with no regression tables Stay for new ways to proxy for crop yields & map hydrological relationships 🧵

Some more cool single-cell powered gene regulatory atlases from the Schmitz lab.

Germline defence from TEs largely relies on piRNAs. Yet, @divyaselvaraju.bsky.social and I monitored a P-element invasion in Drosophila that was stopped by an internally deleted copy, no host intervention required! doi.org/10.1371/jour... Many thanks to @rpianezza.bsky.social & @rokofler.bsky.social

Nature reports on the development of “sexless seeds,” which are crops that seed their own clones and have a host of benefits for farmers. #plantscience 🧪

This is a very cool article on a deeply under-researched topic.

Please share! I'm looking for a postdoc. The position is to lead one of the following projects: 1) regulation of plant specialized metabolism by cell fate, or 2) foliar embryogenesis in the succulent plant Kalanchoe. Learn more abt projects: cxli233.github.io/cxLi_lab/res...

Inactivation of β-1,3-glucan synthase-like 5 confers broad-spectrum resistance to Plasmodiophora brassicae pathotypes in cruciferous plants www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled to announce our new paper is now out in @bmc.springernature.com rdcu.be/eCB2t

My pick for In Other Journals this week: MSH1 suppresses organelle mutation - an investigation of how many plants maintain very low mitochondrial mutation rates My summary here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Paper here: doi.org/10.1371/jour... @sloanevolab.bsky.social #PlantScience

How can England possibly be running out of water? www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Last week I requested a tech and a postdoc position to be created and submitted the ads for those positions. Stay tuned for the official ad. For inquiries, my contact can be found here: cxli233.github.io/cxLi_lab/

A reminder you/your lab can support FlyBase at Cambridge through the following link. Every bit helps. Please share if you yourself can't donate. www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

What’s your favorite food fact that is true but sounds totally made up? I’ll start: about half of the mushrooms produced across the United States of America each year (more than 300 million pounds of mushrooms in recent years) are produced in *one county* in Pennsylvania.

Head of NASA Sean Duffy intends to destroy a satellite that collects key data on carbon dioxide and plant health, by causing it to burn up in the atmosphere. The U.S. Dept of Agriculture and private agriculture firms use the data to forecast crop yield, drought conditions and more.

Some cool stuff from the Comai lab.

it's strange *how little* consciousness of the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh there is in the West, given how awful it was. a combination of racism and Cold War alliances with Pakistan, I suppose, but you'd think that there would have been *some* breakthrough book of the "Rape of Nanking" scale by now

As end-of-empire scenarios go it is so much more dignified to get your capital city sacked by the Visigoths than to have a bunch of illiterate rich people in their 70s doing it through a series of incomprehensible tantrums because their brains were defeated by their phones.

This is an excellent explainer about the US scientific ecosystem. It covers a lot of points I often hear non-scientists asking about: about talent, the dynamics of the academic research environment, Germany, the USSR, history of NSF, NIH. Worth a read. 1/

See also www.propublica.org/article/wate...

📣 New paper alert! Just out in Cell Reports! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40644298/ Thrilled to share that we have discovered a brand-new anti-phage defense system! Bacteria have evolved various defense strategies (CRISPR etc) to counter phage attacks. We found a new one - fascinating and dramatic ⚔️🦠❄️🔬

Open faculty position in computational plant synthetic biology at @universityofga.bsky.social Dept. of Crop & Soil Sciences. Join us in Athens and be a part of UGA's emerging Institute of Synthetic Biology! 👉 Apply: www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/429... #SynBio #PlantScience #FacultyJobs

A State Department employee shared with PBS News an image from inside the department. The image includes a piece of paper taped to a mirror with the words, "Colleagues, if you remain: RESIST FASCISM. Remember the oath you vowed to uphold."

On the other hand, think of the shareholder value they created doing this to the ocean.

a point I make over and over re: climate change is that there’s no point at which it’s time to throw up your hands and give up, because each tenth of a degree you can prevent is worth it 2C is better than 2.1C is better than 2.2C and so on and so forth

Some really nice work from the Schmitz and Johannes labs. A small deletion adjacent to a couple of genes involved in DNA methylation maintenance has lead to a divergence in DNA methylation patterns in an Arabidopsis ecotype from the Cape Verde Islands.

I’ve been studying gene regulation in primates for over 20 years, and using RNA-seq since 2008 to compare expression across species. We thought we were being careful. We used curated orthologous exons to minimize alignment bias and focused on biologically meaningful comparisons. We were wrong.

“I was happing to keep setting institutions on fire, until the flames came too close to singeing my privilege. Now I think you’ve gone too far.” -intellectual professor

!! Check out our new pre-print on using BONCAT Click Chemistry in plants !! Optimization of Bio-Orthogonal Non-Canonical Amino acid Tagging (BONCAT) for effective low-disruption labelling of Arabidopsis proteins in vivo. So many exciting possibilities! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has."

"I want you to understand that the people I’m surrounded by don’t want reason. They don’t like reason. They aren’t shocked or appalled by what’s happening: they are happy to see changes that are “good for the country”. They dont like you."

There is a false dichotomy drawn between "the ivory tower" and "the real world," and I'm here to report that in a post-industrial society, your real-world economy absolutely hinges on the university. University towns are factory towns. Universities drive economic activity, not the other way around.

#Media: "The widespread problem of #foreverchemicals in Canada is alarming and demands urgent federal action... This is the time for bold policy that protects human and environmental health." Read our full statement 👇 environmentaldefence.ca/2025/05/16/s...

Not everything translates from Arabidopsis to crop plants. A group of us had fun considering aspects that have been Lost in Translation. An emerging theme was that still many insights can be gained through comparison with Arabidopsis. academic.oup.com/plcell/artic...